


Pale Petals 'Bout to Fall Off

by TheDragonsLittleBird



Series: Hanahaki AU [1]
Category: American Horror Story: Apocalypse, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood, F/F, Hanahaki Disease, Madison is a stubborn dumbass, Mild Language, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Swearing, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28872408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDragonsLittleBird/pseuds/TheDragonsLittleBird
Summary: It makes her heart rate pick up, because, come the fuck on, some sort of mystery illness is the last thing she wants to worry about, isn’t a bad heart and years of emotional trauma enough to deal with? She worries enough to consider telling Cordelia, but ultimately decides against it; whatever she’s dealing with here, she’ll do so herself. She doesn’t want to get Cordelia involved and see the disarming, genuine worry in her motherly brown eyes. She does well enough at first, hiding her coughing fits as well as she can, and looking up any and all information on what could cause them.Then the petal shows up.
Relationships: Zoe Benson/Madison Montgomery
Series: Hanahaki AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2117385
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	Pale Petals 'Bout to Fall Off

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Magnolia by M2U.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jPQpD7Lndck)

It’s barely noticeable, at first.

It happens when Madison is leaning against the wall during one of Zoe’s classes, watching her teach the younger girls with a passion that Madison would have thought impossible years ago, when they first met; she looks nothing like the meek girl who walked into Robichaux’s that day.

It’s only for a split second that Zoe turns to regard her, that sweet, gentle smile on her face, and immediately it makes Madison let out a slight cough.

She thinks nothing of it, despite feeling her cheeks stupidly heat up, and carries on with her day as usual.

*****

Eventually, it gets harder to ignore.

Whenever she is around Zoe, and the girl displays that gentleness that Madison once thought insufferable, – and perhaps, to some extent, still does, but only because it seems to disarm her – whenever her passion for what she does shines through, whenever she looks at her with those ridiculously kind doe eyes, it makes Madison break into a coughing fit that gets gradually worse each time. She doesn’t actually start to worry until, one time, after a particularly bad episode, she withdraws her hand to see it stained with blood.

It makes her heart rate pick up, because, come the fuck on, some sort of mystery illness is the last thing she wants to worry about, isn’t a bad heart and years of emotional trauma enough to deal with? She worries enough to consider telling Cordelia, but ultimately decides against it; whatever she’s dealing with here, she’ll do so herself. She doesn’t want to get Cordelia involved and see the disarming, genuine worry in her motherly brown eyes. She does well enough at first, hiding her coughing fits as well as she can, and looking up any and all information on what could cause them.

Then the petal shows up.

It happens when Madison least expects it, when they’re talking about something mundane and not at all important to her – to the point she’s just by the corner of the room looking through her phone, only half-listening – but then Queenie says something that makes Zoe laugh, and the sound of it is enough to have Madison coughing out her lungs again, in what’s definitely her worse fit yet. She notices several pairs of worried eyes immediately fall on her, Zoe’s included, the latter of which only makes her cough harder. Zoe’s the first one to get up, followed closely by Cordelia and, ironically enough given how Madison had treated her in the past, Misty, but Madison just raises a hand to stop them from coming any closer – at the back of her mind she somehow knows that Zoe being near her would only make it worse, so she does the exact opposite to try and make it better; she gets away from her.

“It’s fine,” she chokes out in between coughs, angrily, desperately trying not to let a single drop of blood out of her mouth, which she covers with her hand as she runs to the bathroom, still heaving, “I’m fine!”

She doesn’t miss the worried look on Zoe and Cordelia’s faces, nor the confused look on the others’, and she definitely doesn’t miss Mallory watching her like a hawk as she all but sprints out of the room.

Even harder to miss, when she reaches the bathroom and locks the door behind her, is the single gardenia petal which somehow managed to claw out of her lungs and is now sitting in her hand, its white dyed red from her blood.

*****

“Madison, are you okay?”

She almost doesn’t hear it, absent-minded as she is, but she still registers it enough to turn to look at Mallory when she addresses her.

“What, do I not seem okay? What gave it away, me suddenly coughing up a lung earlier this week?” She replies, without looking at her, and Mallory closes the door behind her with a sigh as she approaches the bed.

Madison’s tone is much harsher and more scathing than she initially intended, but something about the question ticks her off; she spent the last three days locked up in a spare room at her request, only coming out when necessary, trying her hardest to stay away from Zoe, convinced that she is the cause of whatever the fuck is happening to her and that it’ll go away on its own if she just avoids her, but it only seems to have made it worse. She can barely sleep well without being jarringly awoken by a stray cough or two, and she’s burned a pillowcase in anger when she managed to accidentally stain its pristine white with red during a fit, the fabric littered with bloodstained white gardenia petals. It should be more than obvious to Mallory that no, she’s not, in fact, okay.

(Somehow, though, she can’t help but feel that Mallory already knows.)

“Well, yes.” Mallory says, matter-of-factly, and doesn’t wait for an invitation to sit down on the bed next to her, things that only serve to remind Madison of how infuriating she finds this girl. “That, and the fact that you’ve requested a separate room for yourself, which you refuse to come out of. What is happening? Miss Cordelia’s worried sick about you and you won’t even let her talk to you.”

“Nothing new in Delia worrying about us.” Madison frowns, still refusing to look at the girl beside her. “She likes to think she’s our mom or something.”

“Madison, I’m serious.” Mallory presses on, disregarding Madison’s comment. “We’re all worried. Are you sick? I’m sure Miss Cordelia or Misty could find a way to help-“

Madison cuts her off with a humorless laugh.

“Yeah, I doubt that, princess.” She says, a little cough clawing out of her throat as Zoe suddenly comes into her mind. Mallory looks completely unfazed, and opens her mouth to say something, before her eyes trail to a spot next to Madison’s pillow.

“What’s this?” She says, getting up, and Madison feels a flash of panic as the girl reaches out towards her pillow, her brows furrowing as she picks something up and examines it. A single gardenia petal is clutched between her fingers, and Madison is suddenly very aware of the fact that there are no gardenias anywhere in her room, or even in the academy’s near vicinity.

“Where did this come from?” Mallory asks, probably thinking the same thing, when she notices the red staining the underside of the petal, and her eyes slightly widen. “Madison, are you- are you coughing up flowers?”

Madison feels a chill run down her spine for whatever reason, and, as she usually does as a defense mechanism, scoffs.

“Seriously?” She says. “Isn’t that like, impossible?”

“So should be setting things on fire with your mind.” Mallory replies, her tone unchanged from before. “So?”

Madison waits several seconds before responding, and lets out a heavy sigh that makes her chest rumble; it suddenly makes the fact that there are literal fucking flowers blossoming in her lungs and depriving her of air whenever they make their way up her throat hit her like a ton of bricks.

“Not- not flowers,” Madison crosses her arms, stubbornly, “just petals. Gardenias.”

“Does it matter?” Mallory says, indignantly, staring at her with her mouth slightly agape, and Madison for the first time ever in her life absolutely hates being in the spotlight. “You need to tell Miss Cordelia.”

Madison scoffs again, and this time it makes her let out a cough that fills her mouth with the now familiar iron-like taste of blood.

“What for?”

“We don’t know what’s causing this.” Mallory insists. “It looks serious. Madison, you’re coughing up blood. Even without the petals, this would already be really alarming.”

Madison just stays silent for several more seconds, considering the situation in her mind, and she absolutely does not want to get Cordelia involved, but she has the feeling Mallory will go and tell her anyway if Madison doesn’t. She decides she’d rather be the one to tell her.

“Fine.” She gets up, pulls out a cigarette carton from her pocket, only to remember the petals curling in her lungs and reconsider it, putting the carton away. “Let’s go tell Delia that I’ve been spitting out a garden, then. I’m sure she’ll love it.”

She doesn’t look back to see if Mallory’s following her, and Mallory says nothing in return as she does.

*****

Cordelia is overwhelmingly worried, and simultaneously relieved, to see Madison at her office’s door, Mallory beside her. The younger girl excuses herself to let Madison speak with Cordelia privately, knowing that this is one of the few things Madison would not like an audience for, and deep down, Madison appreciates it, even if she’s still mad for having been coerced into talking to Cordelia in the first place. The Supreme’s face grows more and more somber the more Madison explains her situation.

“I have heard of something like this, yes.” Cordelia says, intertwining her own fingers. “I believe it’s called Hanahaki Disease.”

“What, like that urban legend shit?” Madison can’t help but say, her mind immediately jumping to how the coughing seems to worsen whenever she’s near or thinking of Zoe, and as if on cue, it makes her let out a cough which has her spit three gardenia petals into her hand. “That’s bullshit. This thing can’t actually be real.”

“Unfortunately, as we of all people should know, legends more often than not have a basis in reality.” Cordelia takes off her glasses and lets out a tired, worried sigh. “I must admit I’ve never heard of anything like this actually happening in real life. Yours is the first case I’ve ever witnessed.”

Madison takes a deep breath, cringing when she feels the petals fluttering about inside her lungs.

“Okay, so, how do you fix it?” She presses her temple, trying her hardest not to lose what little composure she still has.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” Cordelia’s voice is measured, as if she’s breaking terrible news, and it makes Madison deeply uncomfortable. “There are no records in this or any other Coven’s history of this disease, not that I know of, nor publicly known cases. Fiona and Myrtle never mentioned anything about this. I will contact the Warlocks, but I don’t think they will have any answers either. Unfortunately, all we really have to go on so far are the legends.”

Madison grits her teeth. Just her luck, to be affected by a stupid ultra-rare disease nobody even thought was real.

“And what do the legends say?”

“Well,” Cordelia’s tone is still measured, soft, “according to them, Hanahaki is caused by unrequited love.”

“What?” Madison interrupts, flatly.

There’s no way. There’s no fucking way.

Not Zoe fucking Benson.

Cordelia raises a hand to stop her, patiently, and continues:

“The method of getting rid of it varies from legend to legend, but it always involves the object of your love reciprocating your feelings.”

“What if they don’t?” Madison has to ask, because she can’t imagine- there’s no way.

Cordelia’s face falls even more, as if that was possible.

“If they don’t reciprocate, the disease is fatal.”

Madison’s heart drops, along with her jaw.

She has to be fucking kidding her. She’s gonna die of _lovesickness_ for _Zoe Benson?_

This has to be some sort of cruel joke.

“Are you serious?” Madison snaps, starting to panic, feeling the now familiar sensation of the petals starting to crawl up her throat. “Is there no other way?”

“Some, not all, legends say there is.” Cordelia says, her tone a little less somber. “The flowers can be surgically removed, but this takes away the person’s capacity to ever feel anything for the object of their affection ever again, as it quite literally cuts out their feelings for them. Of course, I have no idea how such a surgery would be done, but I would do everything in my power to find out if you so wish, Madison.”

Her tone is gentle and full of affection, but this gives Madison unexpected pause.

She would have thought she would have jumped at the possibility to get rid of these stupid fucking flowers and whatever feelings she has for Zoe they represent, but for some reason, the idea of being incapable of feeling any affection for the girl ever again makes her feel strangely empty.

This thought makes her go into a fit that has her coughing several petals into her hand along with a considerable amount of blood; more than ever before. Cordelia immediately gets up and rushes to her side to steady her, a comforting hand on her back and a painfully worried look in her eyes – there it is, the look Madison absolutely did not want to see.

Madison struggles to catch her breath, a tear rolling down her cheek from the strain the coughing caused, and chokes out:

“What if we just... let it happen? Just let me die and then bring me back? Can’t Swampy or Mallory do it, or something?”

Cordelia furrows her brows.

“I’m not really comfortable with that idea, Madison.” Her tone is serious, but not reprimanding. “There are some things not even Misty can bring someone back from. We don’t know what this disease really is, how it works or how to treat it. All we have to base ourselves off are legends scattered along time. It could be that you might not be able to come back after dying from it, or that dying and coming back won’t make it go away and will just worsen it in the long run, to the point it’ll keep killing you over and over until it’s impossible to bring you back. The truth is, we have no idea what we’re really dealing with here.”

Madison blinks and stares at the floor, processing the information she’s just been given.

“Aren’t you ruling out the other option, though?” Cordelia asks, gently, when she doesn’t respond, rubbing comforting circles into her back. “Why don’t you tell the person how you feel? They might reciprocate.”

Madison scoffs, and the image of a gentle smile and kind doe eyes makes her cough up several more petals.

“How do we know that would even work?” She says, bitterly, struggling to breathe.

“We don’t. But it’s all we have about this at the moment, and I think it’s worth a try.”

Madison stays silent. There’s no way in hell Zoe would ever reciprocate her feelings, no way she’d feel anything above friendship for the alpha bitch nobody likes. Yeah, Madison is perfectly aware of how hot and good-looking she is, and is used to people wanting her, but Zoe is too gentle; Zoe sees people’s heart and soul, not their face or body, and there’s no way she’d ever see anything in Madison’s coal-black, wounded, bitter heart. It’s what drove her to Kyle, it’s what made her love Kyle, and it’s what made her choose Kyle over Madison, even now that Kyle’s gone.

She erupts into another fit, and doubles over, violently coughing into her hand, vaguely aware of the drops of blood falling through her fingers and onto Cordelia’s carpet. When she pulls her hand away, there’s a full blossom of gardenia on her palm, and it makes Cordelia’s eyes widen.

After a few more seconds of silence, Cordelia says, a slight tone of urgency in her voice:

“I’m not going to coerce you into making a decision you don’t want to make, Madison. This is something deeply personal, and it’s entirely your choice. But I beg of you to consider what I said. I’d rather not lose you to something that could have been prevented.”

There’s so much pain in her voice that it makes Madison look up to face her, and not for the first time, it hits her that Cordelia might see her students as her daughters. Maybe this is why Madison didn’t want to face her in the first place. She tries not to dwell too much on it.

Instead of replying, her throat still hoarse, her mouth still full of blood and her hand still clutching the beautiful, deadly white flower, she simply nods, and composes herself as best she can, wiping away the tears from her eyes, before exiting the Supreme’s office.

When Mallory looks at her with inquisitive eyes on the way out, she doesn’t elaborate.

*****

If Cordelia told any of the others what exactly was going on, Madison can’t tell.

All they seem to know is Madison is seriously ill, and Cordelia is still looking for ways to cure her. What Madison hates the most is the look of pity in some of the girls’ eyes as they walk past her. Coco all but dotes all over her. Even Queenie stopped nagging her so much, and Madison isn’t quite sure what to make of that.

She feels like they’ve all been told she’s definitely going to die.

She avoids Zoe like the plague. Most of the time, just the thought of her is enough to make her break into a cough, but being near her actually throws her into a fit that makes her double over and incapacitates her. The full blossoms of gardenia are more common now.

She’s sure Cordelia’s noticed who Madison is pining for, but she respectfully doesn’t bring it up.

It’s only fitting that it culminates one day when Zoe approaches her and asks her if she’s done something wrong, because of course she noticed Madison has been avoiding her specifically; there’s no way she wouldn’t have.

The worry and hurt in her voice are so goddamn palpable it makes Madison’s chest hurt even before she starts heaving petals and the occasional full blossom on the floor, and it makes her miss the slight cough Zoe lets out as she approaches her, her hand covering her mouth and almost immediately closing around something when it comes back down.

Zoe immediately rushes to steady her, when she notices the bloodstained white petals all over the floor, and even through the tears, Madison can see her eyes widen.

She tries to say something, to explain what’s happening, anything, but she can’t speak, and she can’t breathe, not with the flowers and the blood clogging her throat, and she starts to fall to her knees, begrudgingly accepting of the fact that she’s gonna die (and on the back of her mind it strikes her how ironic it is that once again, she’s dying by choking because of love.) She’s now almost fully leaning on Zoe’s slightly taller frame; Zoe, who almost effortlessly holds her up, who has a smile that can bring light even into a heart as dark as Madison’s, who never let her hardships harden her or take away her kindness, but rather matured from her experiences with grace, who’s always been so protective, who went out of her way to comfort Madison at her lowest even when she’d been positively awful to her at every turn. Zoe, who is looking at Madison with those worried, wide doe eyes, and she starts to say something that Madison almost misses because of her coughing.

“You too?”

It takes a while for it to click in Madison’s mind, but the realization seems to make the heaving die down a little; she looks up at Zoe with tearful eyes, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth, feeling the slightest bit of hope rear its head in her chest as she struggles to breathe, practically wheezing. Zoe lifts up a shaking hand and opens it, revealing a single red petal on her palm.

When Madison looks at her questioningly, confusion no doubt plain on her face, Zoe elaborates:

“It started a little while ago.” Her voice is strangely shy, somewhat reminiscent of her old, meeker self. “I didn’t want to worry Miss Cordelia, so I kept it to myself.”

Madison takes a while to find the capacity to speak. She swallows several times, feeling the gardenia petals scratching her throat as she forces them back down, which makes more tears escape her eyes.

“W-when?” She chokes out, trying to clearing her throat, her voice painfully hoarse. “When did it start?”

“...after you started avoiding me.” Zoe seems even more shy now, bashful, even. She avoids Madison’s eyes for a second. “I had been wondering if I’d done something wrong, and noticed that I missed spending time with you, and it just sorta... happened.”

Madison stares at her, flabbergasted. This can’t mean what she thinks it means.

“I don’t know what it is.” Zoe continues. “I can’t find anything about it other than legends, and I’ve been hiding it because everyone’s been so worried about you already, I didn’t want to add to that.”

Madison vaguely registers the fact that Zoe said everyone’s worried about her, but she doesn’t comment on it. If she’s being honest with herself, it surprises her, really. She didn’t think anyone besides Cordelia would care about what happens to her.

“Yeah, well,” Madison is still struggling to speak, but she finds herself a bit more capable of standing on her on, even though she still doesn’t let go of Zoe, “I didn’t want any fuss over this shit either, but Mallory noticed and made me tell Delia.” Her tone is cautious, or as cautious as it can be in her current difficulty to speak.

Zoe sits down on the floor, gently pulling Madison along with her.

“And what did Miss Cordelia say about it?”

Madison hesitates.

“Said it was some stupid urban-legend-made-real shit that is caused by unrequited love or something.”

She doesn’t miss the subtle widening of Zoe’s eyes, nor the little cough she lets out as she processes what Madison just said.

“Oh.” It’s all she replies, for a moment, and there’s an uncomfortable stretch of silence between them that’s filled with tension, before Zoe speaks again. “So you, like, have feelings for someone?”

“Fuck’s sake, Zoe, look around you,” Madison says a bit more harshly than she intended to as she gestures to the white gardenia petals scattered on the floor next to them, and her tone grows softer, “Yes. I’m pining. And it’s literally killing me from the inside out. Happy?”

“Killing?” Zoe furrows her brows, and there’s a slight hint of panic in her tone now. “You’re dying?”

Madison sighs, feeling the petals fluttering in her lungs.

“Yep. Shit’s fatal if the person doesn’t reciprocate your feelings.”

Zoe is silent for a moment, seemingly absorbed in thought.

“What if they do?”

“What?”

“What if the person does reciprocate?”

Madison narrows her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Zoe places the red petal in Madison’s hand, gently closing her fingers around it, and keeps her hand on top of hers.

“You know, I asked Misty about this flower.” She says, in that gentle tone of hers that only she can quite pull off, that makes the petals want to crawl out of Madison’s throat. “It’s Amaryllis. She said it symbolizes determination, beauty and pride.” She pauses. “Looking back on it, I guess it makes perfect sense they’d be yours.”

It takes a while for it to register in Madison’s head, but once it does, her eyes widen. She doesn’t know quite what to say, so she says nothing.

Zoe speaks again, and there’s an impossibly loving smile on her face now, her tone even softer:

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Madison chokes up, and for the first time in weeks, it’s not because of the flowers.

“Didn’t think you’d ever feel the same.” It’s all she says, and she absolutely hates how shaky her voice is, but she feels like a huge weight’s been lifted off her shoulders, and she’s vaguely aware of the fact that the petals in her lungs seem to be slowly dissipating.

“And you were okay with dying because of it?” It’s not accusatory at all, simply slightly surprised. Madison shrugs in response.

“Seemed better than the alternative. I already died once, so no big deal. Having this ripped out of me and never feeling anything for you again would have been-“ she cuts herself off before she can say any of the many words that run through her mind; _awful, hell, insufferable, wrong, absolutely miserable._ She settles on something less damning: “...weird.”

Zoe simply smiles, brighter than the sun, though with a hint of bittersweetness in it, and gently picks up one of the gardenia blossoms from the floor, looking at it with such fondness it makes Madison’s heart hurt.

“I’ll need to ask Swampy what those mean.” Says Madison, suddenly feeling shy, aware of the heat creeping up her cheeks.

“No need,” Zoe replies, “I know this one. ‘Purity,’ ‘gentleness,’ ‘secret love.’”

Well, fuck. If Madison wasn’t blushing hard enough already.

“Is this really how you see me?” Zoe sounds flattered, almost a little disbelieving.

“I...” Madison stumbles over her words, but ultimately decides she might as well just tell her. It’s all out in the open now, anyway. “Well, yeah. Yeah, it is.”

There’s quite more to that, which Madison doesn’t dare say out loud; how Zoe has been the single source of light in her life for the past few years, how despite what made her be brought to the academy in the first place, she’s genuinely the nicest, sweetest person she’s ever met, how much she feels like she doesn’t deserve her kindness, isn’t worthy of her affection, but she feels like she might not need to anyway, because Zoe seems to pick up on everything Madison wants to say but can’t, and pulls her closer to place the gentlest kiss on her lips.

Madison feels the last of the petals in her lungs fade away.

**Author's Note:**

> I might write some more for this AU since I even have all their individual flowers picked out
> 
> ~~I think I screwed up Madison's characterization I'm so sorry~~


End file.
